70 years later, a final hike up Ghost Mountain

Rider South, 79, grew up living without any modern conveniences on a mountaintop in Anza-Borrego Desert with his parents and siblings. Tom Pfingsten

Rider South, 79, grew up living without any modern conveniences on a mountaintop in Anza-Borrego Desert with his parents and siblings. Tom Pfingsten

Rider South, 79, grew up living without any modern conveniences on a mountaintop in Anza-Borrego Desert with his parents and siblings. Tom Pfingsten

On a recent Sunday morning, a tall, serious man named Rider South set out toward the top of a mountain in the Anza-Borrego Desert like he used to as a boy seven decades earlier — only this time, he was leading an expedition of 30 people to the summit.

The son of legendary writer, artist and lifestyle adventurer Marshal South, Rider is 79 years old now, a far cry from the 12-year-old who descended Ghost Mountain in 1946 to return only for day hikes, like this one.

The occasion was a special event organized by the Anza-Borrego Foundation, a sort of last hike up Ghost Mountain with two of the three now-grown children who once lived up there. (South and the group were accompanied by his sister, Victoria, who flew in from Washington for the weekend.)

A day later, I sat down with South and Diana Lindsay, the founder of Sunbelt Publications who has coordinated the reprinting of much of his father’s masterful writings.

The two were at the Escondido Public Library to host the last of a handful of public appearances promoting Sunbelt’s “Marshal South Rides Again,” a brand-new reproduction of two of the author’s Western novels, both set in Anza-Borrego.

“I’m proud that he was such a great author and artist,” Rider told me as I turned the 300-page volume over to read the synopses. “He wrote a suspenseful story. Mother read them to us.”

Moments like that — a family reading time — must have been among the few experiences that the South children shared with their urban and suburban peers.

The family lived without any modern conveniences at the top of the Anza-Borrego Desert, too proud to stand in the Depression-era food lines and just stubborn enough to make it work.

“They homesteaded on this dry, waterless mountaintop with this fabulous view, carried everything up there, built cisterns to capture water, and had a family,” explained Lindsay, whose research and interest in the history of the homestead is largely responsible for the ongoing awareness of the story in San Diego County.

Thumbing through Sunbelt’s anthology of Marshal South’s Desert Magazine columns, it’s easy to see why the publication saw him through about 100 of his wilderness tales.

Each one is crafted with a poet’s touch and an obvious, fascinated love with the backcountry. Desert Refuge No. 21, from April 1943, begins like this: “Crackle of burning wood in the grey light of dawn — the aromatic tang of smoke lifting like incense in the chill morning air.”

It’s the kind of writing that is still a complete surprise, given the circumstances of its origin.

After leaving Ghost Mountain, Rider South graduated from Point Loma High School and lived a quiet life in San Diego, settling into a 35-year career as a civilian aircraft mechanic and rarely mentioning his unorthodox upbringing.

“People have different versions of the way they want their children to grow up,” he told me, explaining why the experiment had ended in his parents’ split, two years before Marshal South died. “Father had one version and Mother had another version — Father had grown up in Australia, on a sheep ranch in the wilderness, and Mother’s teenage years were in New York City.”

South’s mother enrolled him in dance lessons after they came down the mountain, and that’s where he met the woman who would become his wife decades later. Lucile Iverson was a gorgeous blond dance instructor, but she was 22 years his senior.

They were married in October 1980 and moved to Silver City, N.M., in 1989, spending a total of 30 years together before she died last year at the age of 100.

South still lives in Silver City, and he was headed back the day after our interview.

Although he didn’t say it, I suspected the previous day’s hike up Ghost Mountain had been the highlight of the trip.

Up on the summit, he had pointed out where Marshal’s writing room had been, where the cisterns once collected precious rainwater.

“There’s actually just one kind of an archway still standing,” said Lindsay, who accompanied him on the trek. “Everything else has melted back into the earth.”

While he was open and friendly, I found South to be a man of few words. He didn’t dramatize anything about his childhood; it was all very matter-of-fact.

He enjoyed his upbringing “probably as much as any kid would have in the city,” he said. “Nothing seemed strange or different — it was just growing up with my parents and my brother and sister.”

Through the years, folks would find out who he was from time to time — perhaps they had seen Marshal’s byline in Desert Magazine — and they’d ask away.

The overriding question was always, “Why?”

“From father’s perspective, it was the outdoor life — the experiment,” Rider South would explain. “But they would ask me what we ate, about the water, and how we met other people.

“Father went into town once a month to collect the check from Desert Magazine, and we would go into town, say, once every six months,” he added.

“Into town” usually meant Julian, but “sometimes we’d come here, to Escondido, to get oranges when they were in season, and Ramona to get 100-pound sacks of wheat and corn, potatoes and onions.”

When I asked him whether he feels an emotional connection to Ghost Mountain and the ways of his childhood, he shrugged.

“I still remember it very clearly, but I don’t have any yearning to go back,” he admitted.

Ghost Mountain was behind him as soon as he hiked out of the desert, it would seem: “It was like a page of a book had been closed.”

“Marshal South Rides Again,” from Sunbelt Publications, is available for $14.95, and “Marshal South and the Ghost Mountain Chronicles,” the Desert Magazine anthology, is still for sale at $21.95. Visit